Chapter 6 #4
"I know." August moves back to his chair, puts the table between them, a solid, reassuring boundary.
His tea has gone cold, but he wraps his hands around the cup anyway, needing something to hold that isn't warm and alive and looking at him with amber eyes.
"I'm not opposed to working with you. I want the rifts closed too.
But if we're doing this, there are ground rules. "
"I'm listening."
August places his hands flat on the table. "No other Templars. I work with you and you exclusively. If you bring another Templar into this, or share my identity with the Order, I'm gone."
Vale snorts quietly. "Trust me. The less the Order knows about this arrangement, the better for both of us. This isn't exactly sanctioned."
Good. The more mutually assured the secrecy, the safer August feels. He nods.
"What else?" Vale asks.
August holds his gaze. "You don't touch me unless I say so."
The shift in Vale's expression is subtle but unmistakable: surprise first, and then something more guarded.
He regards August for a long, silent moment, his scrutiny almost a physical weight between them.
August holds eye contact despite the discomfort, because Vale needs to understand that this isn't a negotiation.
This is the line. This is the one thing August cannot budge on, because everything else in his life is out of his control, the corruption, the Order, the dying, and this is the one thing he gets to decide.
Vale leans back in his chair and crosses his arms.
"If I hadn't touched you last night, you'd be dead," he says. His tone is neutral, stating a fact he ostensibly has no feelings about, but if he truly had no stake in it, he wouldn't have brought it up.
He's not wrong. If Vale hadn't been in the subway, if he hadn't caught August when he fell, if they hadn't discovered this impossible connection between their magics, August would be dead on that platform. Cold and still and surrounded by chalk circles and good intentions. That is fact.
"I'm grateful to be alive," August says carefully. "I'm grateful to you for saving me."
"But?"
"But I don't want you to touch me unless I ask you to.
" He can see the slight narrowing of Vale's eyes, the flicker of something that might be frustration.
It doesn't matter. He doesn't owe this man an explanation.
He's allowed to have boundaries without dissecting the reasons behind them, without admitting, even to himself, that the reason has less to do with fear and more to do with the fact that standing between Vale's thighs with that warmth pouring into him had made him feel things he cannot afford to feel about someone who could still destroy him.
"If you can't manage that, we can't work together. "
Vale holds up both hands. "I can manage. I'm not the one killing myself."
August wants to point out that he's been managing his corruption for years without anyone's help.
Wants to point out that he survived fourteen years on his own and doesn't need a Templar to lecture him about self-preservation.
But he lets it go. He'll need Vale's healing touch going forward, since closing three rifts will exact a toll he can't pay alone, and this fragile arrangement won't survive if they start every conversation with a fight.
"Okay," August says. "Partners. For however long it takes to close the rifts, stop Voss, and keep the vault secure."
He doesn't ask what happens after. Whether Vale plans to turn him over to the Order once he's no longer useful.
Whether he'll let August go back to helping spirits in the Old City and pretend they never met.
Those are questions for a future that August isn't confident he'll live to see, and asking them now would mean admitting he cares about the answers.
"First priority is the warehouse rift," Vale says, pivoting back to work mode with a seamlessness that August envies.
"It's in a high-traffic area and when the blessing circle fails, it's going to be a disaster.
We have Templars stationed in the area monitoring it, but it needs to be closed permanently. "
August reaches for the map. "Tonight, then. Before Voss can open his next one. That last rift was enormous, and the power expenditure might slow him down for a few days, but we shouldn't count on it."
"The subway rift can wait. The blessing circle is fresh and the location is isolated.
But we close as many as we can before Voss moves again.
" Vale pauses, shifts in his chair, and then, with the same abruptness with which he'd returned to strategy, pivots right back into August's personal business.
"You look better. But not good. When's the last time you ate? "
August bristles. "Why does everyone keep asking me that?"
"Because you look like a strong breeze would fold you in half." Vale stands, apparently having made a decision without consulting August. "I need to check in with the Sanctus. I'll bring food when I come back. Then we head to the warehouse."
"I'm not planning to sit here idle waiting for you.
" August watches him pull on his coat and buckle it to his chin, the transformation from man back to Templar happening in real time.
The softness goes first, then the ease, then the warmth, until what's left is the soldier August had first seen in the cemetery.
The contrast is jarring. August isn't sure which version is the real one.
He suspects the answer is both. "I have spirits to help. "
"Far be it from me to tell you what to do." Vale finishes with his coat and reaches for his sword, and the last of the man disappears into the Templar. "But you should rest. We don't know what tonight looks like."
August stares at him. Vale's voice is flat, his expression giving away nothing, but underneath it August catches the shape of something the Templar is clearly unaccustomed to expressing.
It's concern. Genuine, uncomfortable, probably unwelcome even to himself.
The kind that a man like Vale would deny if confronted with it, because admitting you care about a necromancer's wellbeing is probably not covered in the Templar handbook.
August has been told to take care of himself before. He doesn't usually listen.
"You'll come back?" August asks. Then, because the man might need the reminder: "Alone?"
Vale's expression shifts. Just slightly, just enough. A softening that cracks through the armor he's just finished putting on, and August watches it happen with the helpless fascination of someone seeing something they know they shouldn't be seeing. "Yes. I'll be alone."
August blows out a breath. "Fine. I'll rest."
He gets one brief moment of seeing something close to relief cross Vale's face, something that confirms, beyond any remaining doubt, that the concern is real and that this completely unorthodox Templar is choosing to care about him in defiance of every rule that governs his existence.
Then Vale grabs his sword and walks out the door.
August watches him go.
He tries not to think about how the apartment feels colder the moment Vale leaves.
Tries not to think about the phantom warmth still lingering on his wrist where Vale's thumb had rested against his pulse.
Tries not to think about what it means that, for the first time in years, the most dangerous thing in his life isn't the corruption.
It's the growing, treacherous suspicion that he might be in over his head in a way that has to do with steady hands and a warmth he's already learning to crave.
He is in so much trouble.