Chapter 8
August sleeps for twelve hours.
He wakes to overcast sky through his window and the low, steady pulse of holy magic emanating from the next room, a presence that is, against all reason, becoming familiar.
The corruption is still there. It's always there, a slow burn beneath his skin, a reminder of what he is and what it costs.
But it's manageable now. Steady. Reduced to something he can carry rather than something carrying him.
There's an expanse of skin on his chest, the width of Vale's palm, that's clearer than it's been in months.
When August presses his own hand over it, he swears he can still feel the warmth, a lingering impression that hasn't faded with sleep.
If he thinks about it too long, about Vale's hand against his clavicle, about the way the corruption had retreated from that touch, it becomes overwhelming in ways he isn't equipped to handle.
So he doesn't think about it. He gets up.
His tattoos help him ward off corruption and guide his spells.
They're more effective when exposed, which is why August has spent more nights than he can count kneeling in freezing graveyards in little more than a tank top, shivering in the cold while he talks to the dead.
The discomfort is secondary to optimization; the less power he wastes, the longer he lives.
But he's not casting in his own apartment. And he's acutely self-conscious of the way Vale's eyes track the faded veins on his skin. August doesn't need the Templar cataloguing his body's ruin any more than he already has.
He pulls on a dark sweater and jeans and pads into the living space.
It's less jarring this time, finding Vale among his things. Less like discovering an intruder and more like something expected. Something that fits. That's the part that frightens him.
Vale is on the couch, notes and research spread across the coffee table.
His coat hangs by the door again, his sword leaning against the wall, and August is beginning to understand that these small disarmaments are deliberate.
Vale removing his armor in August's space is a language unto itself.
I'm not here as a Templar. I'm here as something else.
What that something else is, August isn't ready to examine.
Vale's sleeves are pushed to his elbows, forearms resting on his knees as he leans over the table.
August knows the strength in those arms. Has felt it around him, holding him up, holding him together.
The memory surfaces before he can stop it, the warehouse floor, Vale's hand running up the length of his arm with firm, deliberate pressure, the corruption fleeing, and August has to avert his eyes before the heat crawling up his neck becomes visible.
He doesn't realize he's lingering in the doorway until Vale glances up. Those brown eyes find him immediately, warm despite the coolness of the man behind them, and August feels pinned the same way he had in the graveyard.
"There's food," Vale says, nodding toward the takeout boxes on the coffee table. Chinese, from somewhere in the Old City. The unspoken demand, sit down and eat before we have to argue about it again, is loud enough that August doesn't bother resisting.
He crosses the room and sinks onto the opposite end of the sofa, reaching for a container and chopsticks.
It's not that he actively chooses not to eat.
It's that the pain usually consumes everything, and forcing food down while his bones are burning feels impossible.
But the pain is quiet right now, and the food smells good, and he doesn't know what to make of the fact that every meal he's had in the past two days has been provided by a Templar.
He's not sure whether it's kindness or strategy.
He's starting to suspect the answer is both, and that both are genuine.
"The pattern suggests Voss needs to compensate for the warehouse rift closing," Vale says, attention back on the map in the center of the table, marked in various colors of ink, their combined research layered over each other.
"He'll either accelerate the timeline or increase the power of the remaining rifts to make up the deficit. "
"Or both." August reaches past his food to tap the map, angling his body away from Vale's proximity without thinking about it.
The movement is automatic, habitual, the same way he angles away from anything that could hurt him.
He points to a location on the north side.
"Here. The old railway station. It's the logical next target in the sequence.
If I had to guess at timing, I'd estimate tomorrow night based on the lunar cycle. "
"That gives us some time."
"Not if we want to close another rift first." August settles back against the cushions. "We should close one tonight. The fewer active rifts feeding the binding circle, the weaker Voss's ritual becomes."
Working with Vale is strange.
Not just because he's a Templar, though that is certainly strange enough.
It's that he pries into the sealed-off corners of August's life in a way no one ever has.
He asks questions about necromancy that August has never answered for another living person.
He inserts himself into August's wellbeing without asking permission, without apology, with the quiet certainty of a man who has decided something and sees no reason to discuss it further.
And he puts up with exactly zero of the self-neglect that has been the defining feature of August's existence for twenty six years.
Which is to say: August is prepared to suffer through his corruption the way he always has, and Vale is having none of it.
"About tonight," Vale says, turning to face him properly.
His eyes trail down August's body, not quickly, not casually, and August feels every inch of that gaze.
It's not clinical. It's not predatory either.
It's the look of someone trying to understand something that matters to them in ways they haven't fully mapped.
"If we're going to do this, I need you to be more receptive to me touching you. "
August's whole body tenses. Heat floods his cheeks. He stares at Vale as though the man has just suggested he teach him necromancy. "Excuse me?"
"Closing rifts costs more than we calculated.
You closed one last night, you're closing another tonight, and you're fighting an active rift tomorrow.
" Vale holds eye contact with the unflinching directness of someone who knows he's right and doesn't particularly care if it's uncomfortable.
"That's going to require significantly more cooperation between us if you want to survive to see the weekend. "
"I let you heal me after the warehouse," August says, and he can't keep the frost out of his voice. "I was receptive."
"You let me heal you long enough that you could stand on your own.
That's not enough." Vale's tone isn't unkind, but it's immovable.
"The corruption rebuilds between sessions even without you casting.
Last night you went into the rift with hours of accumulated damage that my healing hadn't reached, and it nearly killed you.
If we keep compounding the cost without addressing the foundation, you won't make it through the third rift. "
The frustrating thing is that he's right, and August has been painfully aware of it.
Vale's touch in the subway had pulled him from the edge of death.
But in the hours since, even without visible darkening on his skin, the corruption had been rebuilding.
A slow, insidious pressure in his bones.
A heat behind his eyes. By the time he'd entered the warehouse rift, the damage underneath had been significant, and stepping into concentrated death energy had detonated it.
And yes, Vale's healing afterward had been transformative.
But August had only been able to stay in his arms for a few minutes before it became too much.
Not too much pain. Too much of everything else.
The warmth, the intimacy, the terrifying vulnerability of coming apart under someone else's hands.
The sounds he couldn't control. The wanting he couldn't afford.
So he'd pulled away before the healing was complete. And they both knew it.
"Okay," August says slowly, shifting on the couch. "What do you have in mind?"
Vale stands and moves down the sofa, sitting back down without the buffer of space that had existed between them.
He turns to face August, both of them sideways on the couch now, and even just this close August can feel the radiance he exudes, the low, constant warmth of holy energy that used to make his skin crawl and now makes his pulse quicken for entirely different reasons.
His body has decided, without consulting his brain, that this particular warmth is something it wants more of.
"Relax," Vale says softly.
August watches him with the wariness of someone expecting a blow they can feel coming but can't predict. He expects Vale to reach for his shoulders. Maybe his arms, somewhere safely clothed, somewhere clinical.
So he's entirely unprepared when Vale's hands frame his face.
Callused palms against his jawline. Thumbs settling on his cheekbones with a gentleness that has no business belonging to hands this large, this capable of violence.
The touch is warm and careful and so unbearably tender that August flinches, a full-body jerk that he can't suppress, that he watches register in Vale's eyes as something that hurts them both.
But he doesn't pull away.
He stays in Vale's hands. Heart slamming. Breath locked in his throat. And feels the warmth begin to seep into him.