8. Chapter 8 #3
It was the directness that surprised him. Lorne usually came at difficult ground the way he came at skittish animals, obliquely, patiently, leaving room. This was straight in.
Valdyr was quiet a moment. The answer lived somewhere he didn't visit.
"Hollow."
It came out before he could edit it. Blunt and plainer than he'd meant.
"There's a space. In the chest. Where the bond's meant to sit. And for most of your life it's just empty. Not painful. Absent. Like a room in a house that was never furnished. You know it's there. You walk past the door. You don't go in, because there's nothing in there to go in for."
Lorne had gone very still beside him.
"After long enough you stop noticing. You build the rest of the house around it and shut the door.
You fill everything else up with work and duty and purpose, and you tell yourself the room doesn't signify, because you've never used it and you function perfectly well.
" His jaw worked. "And then one night you walk through a garden and the door comes off its hinges and the room is full.
Full of light and warmth and the smell of honey, and you understand that it was never empty. It was only waiting."
He had not meant to say any of that. The words had come up from behind the lock and they were true and he could not take them back, and Lorne was looking at him with an expression that was open and aching and entirely without surprise.
"So it's worse now," Lorne said. "Not better. You've been in the room."
"It used to be an absence. Now it's a presence. Yes. It's worse."
Lorne was quiet. When he spoke it was not about Valdyr, or it was, through a different door.
"I know about loneliness. Not your kind.
The other kind. Where you're surrounded by people who look at you and see a function instead of a person.
" His voice was steady. Not sad. Accurate.
"An omega instead of a man. A treaty instead of a person.
A body to be claimed instead of a mind worth asking. "
The words settled into the quiet garden.
"My brothers love me. My father loves me.
But even at home there was always this sense that I was the gentle one.
The soft one. The one you'd send somewhere, because his nature makes him useful in ways a sword isn't. And I accepted it.
I was glad to be useful." His fingers found a crack in the stone bench and traced it.
"I only wished, now and then, that one of them would ask what I thought about something other than flowers. "
Valdyr looked at his own hands. Scarred and scaled and twice the size of Lorne's. Hands built for swords and shields and doing damage. Hands that had held a cut foot with more care than they had ever shown anything living.
"The river route," he said.
Lorne blinked. "What?"
"At council. The grain. It was good. It was better than anything the trade ministry has managed in a month of meetings."
Lorne stared at him. His lips parted and the color came up in his face and his scent opened, and for a moment he looked exactly as he had that first night, startled and warm and devastatingly pleased.
"You were listening."
"I listen to everything you say."
The words hung there. Too honest. Too much. Valdyr felt them land and could not call them back and was not certain he wanted to.
Lorne turned on the bench, angling toward him, and they were very close.
Close enough that their scents lay over one another.
His eyes came up and the last light caught the gold in them and his lips were parted and the air between them was warm and charged and full of everything they were not doing.
Valdyr stood up.
He put distance in, a foot of it, then two, and the loss registered on Lorne's face before he could get it hidden. A flicker. The brightness going down. Quick, controlled, and unbearable to watch.
The restraint was starting to feel less like honor and more like the wrong word for cruelty.
"It's getting dark," Valdyr said, gruff and steady and betraying nothing.
"Yes," Lorne said, steady and betraying nothing. "It is."
They went back inside separately. Valdyr first, Lorne trailing at a distance, because they had learned the choreography of almost the way dancers learn steps, every movement placed, every gap measured, the whole thing calibrated to sustain the fiction that they were not what they were.
At the junction where their paths split, his quarters left and Lorne's chambers right, they stopped.
"Good night, Valdyr."
His name, in that mouth. It took him apart every time.
"Good night, Lorne."
A pause. A breath. Honey and woodsmoke tangled in the corridor between them.
Lorne went right. Valdyr went left. The bond drew out between them like a thread and held and kept holding, and neither of them looked back, because looking back would break the fragile discipline that was the only thing standing between them and the catastrophe of what they wanted.
In his quarters, Valdyr sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the rosemary.
On the pillow beside it lay a sprig of lavender.
Lorne must have come by while the afternoon meeting ran. It was fresh, recently cut, the flowers still purple, lying against the dark fabric like something whispered.
Valdyr picked it up and held it under his nose and breathed in, and it was lavender, and underneath the lavender it was faintly Lorne, the ghost of his fingers on the stem, the trace of honey in the oil of his skin.
He held it a long time.
Then he set it beside the rosemary, where it stayed, and where every sprig that came after it would stay, because he kept all of them.
He would go on keeping them until there was a garden on his bedside table and the room smelled of everything Lorne was, and he slept surrounded by it, and that was the nearest he was ever going to get to sleeping beside his mate.
Underneath the restraint and the honor and the cold discipline of thirty years of soldiering, something was hardening. Not patience. Something closer to a blade being made, the slow deliberate business of heat and hammer and quenching that turns raw metal into an edge.
He had not forgotten the bruise. He was never going to forget the bruise.
And the more he loved this man, and he loved him, the word had been unavoidable since the greenhouse, since the mince pie, since Lorne wrapped his fingers around his wrist and held on, the less he could stand watching him walk right at that junction every night.
Every time the anger came up and moved him toward the door, Lorne's voice caught him at it. My family.
So he held. He held the way he held a line, with teeth and will and the understanding that giving way would destroy something more important than himself.
The suppressants had been gone a fortnight. The heat was coming, and it was coming soon, and he did not yet know what he would do when it arrived.
He knew what he would not do. He would not let the king have him in heat. He would die before that happened. He would burn Thessmere to the foundations before that happened. He would break every oath he had ever sworn and stand there afterward and let them tell him what it cost.
The how of it was the part he had no answer for. The how of it was what kept him on his back with his eyes open, lavender on the pillow and rosemary on the table and the ghost of honey in his memory, working the problem and finding no version of it that did not end in blood.