Chapter 6
Lethe brings him an orange.
It's tucked inside the satchel, beneath the bandages and the salve tin, wrapped in a scrap of cloth that doesn't quite hide the color of it.
Lethe sets it beside Zazyrus's knee the way he sets everything: without ceremony, without eye contact, as though the offering materialized there on its own and had nothing to do with the boy who carried it down two flights of stairs and past three guard posts hidden in a medical bag.
Zazyrus looks at it.
It's fresh. The skin is bright, vivid, a shock of color in a cage that holds nothing but grey stone and dark iron and bloodstained straw.
It's the size of his palm. It smells sharp and sweet and alive, and the scent cuts through the damp and the mildew and the old-blood stink of the deep kennels with a clarity that makes something behind Zazyrus's ribs constrict.
He picks it up. The skin gives slightly under the pressure of his thumb, firm but yielding, and a fine mist of citrus oil sprays from the pores and the smell intensifies and Zazyrus holds the thing in his clawed hand and stares at it and thinks.
He thinks a lot of things.
He thinks about what this cost. Not in coin, though coin was likely involved, but in risk.
Sneaking food to the fighters is not permitted.
The guards confiscate rations and punish the offender if they're caught, and the punishment scales with the value of the contraband, and a fresh orange in the pits is not cheap.
The boy risked something to bring him this.
He risked something and he set it down beside Zazyrus's knee and didn't mention it, didn't wait for thanks, didn't even look at him while he did it.
He thinks about the fact that no one has given him a gift in his memory.
Objects have been assigned to him. Rations have been dispensed.
Tools and equipment and the bare necessities of survival have been provided by owners who were investing in their property's upkeep, not offering kindness.
This is different. This is a bright, fragile, achingly thoughtful thing placed in the hand of a creature who has done nothing to earn it and everything to discourage it, and the boy who gave it is currently kneeling beside him talking about a cat.
He thinks about that, too. About how the boy gives and gives and gives, rations and water and clean bandages and the steady current of his voice, and never once asks for anything in return.
Not compliance. Not gratitude. Not the performance of rehabilitation that owners always want, the tamed beast, the broken will, the satisfying proof that cruelty works.
Lethe doesn't want Zazyrus tamed. Lethe doesn't seem to want anything from him at all, except to be allowed to help, and the selflessness of that is so foreign to Zazyrus's experience that he keeps turning it over looking for the lie and can't find one.
He peels the orange. His claws are not ideal for the task but they manage, puncturing the skin and tearing it away in strips.
The juice runs over his fingers, sticky and sharp.
He separates a segment and puts it in his mouth and the sweetness is so intense, so violently alive, that he closes his eyes.
When he opens them, the boy is watching.
Not obviously. His hands are still working, unwinding a bandage from Zazyrus's ribs, but his eyes have drifted up and there is something in his expression that Zazyrus can't categorize.
Something soft. Something that hurts to look at, though Zazyrus couldn't say why.
Their eyes meet. Lethe drops his gaze. Resumes his work.
Zazyrus eats the orange. He says nothing. But he eats every segment, and when it's gone he holds the empty rind in his hand and the scent lingers on his fingers for hours after the boy leaves.
***
The boy is stitching a gash on his ribs.
New fight. New wounds. The rhythm continues, relentless, and the boy keeps pace with it. He arrives after each bout with his satchel restocked and his hands clean and his voice already running, filling the cage before his knees hit the stone. Today's topic is the kitten.
"She's getting fat," Lethe says, threading his needle.
"Maren says it's because I sneak her too much fish, which is true, but Soot doesn't complain and I don't think it's fair to let Maren dictate her diet when Maren feeds the entire kitchen staff pastry scraps for breakfast." He sets the first stitch and Zazyrus's breath hisses through his teeth and the boy pauses, waits, continues.
"I tried to introduce her to one of the fighters in the upper cages.
The one with the broken tooth. He loves her.
He held her in one hand and she fell asleep and I thought my heart was going to give out. "
Zazyrus watches him. The boy talks with his whole body.
His eyebrows move. His mouth curves and flattens and curves again.
His free hand gestures when he gets animated, which is always, trailing in the air between them while the hand with the needle remains rock-steady.
The dissonance is remarkable. The boy can hold a conversation about kittens and sew a two-inch laceration at the same time without either hand knowing what the other is doing.
"I named the black one Soot, which is terrible," Lethe says.
He ties off a stitch and cuts the thread and re-threads the needle with a practiced motion that takes less than a second.
"She looks like soot, and I'm not very creative.
It's a character flaw. Hopefully I never have to name a human.
Can you imagine? Hello, your baby is here, I've named him Floor because that's where I found him. "
A sound escapes Zazyrus before he can stop it.
Low. Rough. Barely a breath, caught somewhere between his chest and his throat, expelled in a short, involuntary burst that is not a growl and not a sigh and might, under duress and with sufficient plausible deniability, be classified as a laugh.
The boy goes still.
Needle in hand, thread trailing, his fingers frozen mid-stitch.
He looks up at Zazyrus and his eyes are wide and blue and startled and there is something dawning in them, something incredulous and delighted, as though he's just witnessed an impossibility.
A sunrise underground. Snow in summer. A beast who laughs.
Zazyrus stares back at him. The sound is gone, vanished as quickly as it came, and he can't retrieve it and he can't deny it and the boy is looking at him with those wide eyes and Zazyrus has not been looked at with that expression in a very long time.
Wonder. That's the word for it. The boy is looking at him with wonder.
Lethe's mouth curves. Slowly. Carefully.
A small thing, that smile, tentative at the edges, as though it's testing whether it's allowed to exist. It cracks open his face in a way that changes everything about it: the set of his jaw softens, the tension around his eyes eases, the wariness that lives permanently in his expression retreats, just for a moment, and what's left is young and bright and startlingly, painfully beautiful.
The smile is a door cracking open. Just a sliver. Just enough light to see through.
Lethe drops his gaze back to his work. His needle resumes.
But the smile doesn't leave, not entirely.
It lingers at the corners of his mouth, pressed down but not extinguished, and the flush on the back of his neck is visible above his collar, a slow tide of pink that starts at his nape and spreads upward to his ears and forward, presumably, to his face, though his head is bowed and Zazyrus can't see it.
He doesn't need to see it. He can see the pink crawling up the sides of the boy's neck, blooming behind his ears, coloring the pale skin in a way that is vivid and involuntary and completely, transparently honest. The boy is flushed because Zazyrus laughed.
The boy is smiling because Zazyrus laughed.
The equation is simple and the implications are not, and Zazyrus sits with both while the boy finishes his stitches in a silence that, for the first time, feels companionable rather than cautious.
Lethe ties off the last stitch. Applies salve.
Bandages. His movements are sure and practiced but softer now, warmer, as though the laugh unlocked something in his hands as well as his face.
He smooths the bandage over Zazyrus's ribs and his thumb lingers for a half-second longer than it needs to, a feather-weight press of skin against skin that could be accidental and isn't.
"There," he says. His voice has a quality to it that wasn't there before. Lighter. Almost breathless. "Good as new. Well. Good as good-enough, which is the best I can promise down here."
He packs his satchel. He stands. He's halfway to the cage door before he turns, and the smile is still there, reduced to a faint curve, a residual warmth that hasn't quite faded.
His cheeks are pink. His eyes are bright.
He opens his mouth, closes it, and shakes his head at himself in a gesture that is so plainly self-conscious it borders on endearing.
"See you tomorrow, Zazyrus," he says, and the way he says the name is different. Careful. As though he's tasting it.
The cage door closes. The lock turns. The footsteps recede.
***
Zazyrus sits in the silence and the silence is different now.
It's not empty the way it used to be. It's not the hard, compressed void he built around himself when he arrived, the space that belonged to him and no one else.
The boy has been filling it for days, pouring in words and warmth and the smell of herbs and citrus, and Zazyrus has been telling himself that none of it is staying, that the silence repairs itself each time the boy leaves, that the space is still his.
He laughed.
The realization settles over him with the weight of something irreversible.
He laughed and the boy smiled and the boy's cheeks went pink and the boy said his name differently, and Zazyrus is sitting in a cage in the dark and the orange rind is on the floor beside him and his ribs are freshly stitched and the silence is full of things that weren't there a month ago.
He didn't intend for this. He doesn't want this.
He wants the rage and the silence and the cold, clear clarity of having nothing to lose, because having nothing to lose is the only advantage a caged beast has.
Attachment is a leash. Caring is a collar.
Wanting something in this place is an invitation for the humans who own him to find it and use it against him and break it in front of his eyes, and Zazyrus has learned this lesson enough times to know it by heart.
But the boy smiled at him and something in Zazyrus's chest, something he thought was dead, something he was certain he'd burned out of himself through years of fury and pain and deliberate, necessary numbness, lifted its head.
This one is trouble.
He knows it the way he knows the guard rotations and the chain lengths and the distance from his cage to the arena floor.
He knows it the way he knows which wounds will scar and which will heal clean.
This boy, this small, gentle, relentless, brave, impossible boy with his steady hands and his kitten and his orange smuggled in a medical bag, is going to be a problem.
The boy looked at Zazyrus and smiled and the smile was a door cracking open, and Zazyrus should want that door shut.
He should want the boy to stop coming, stop talking, stop filling the silence with his warmth and his voice and his careful, tentative offerings.
He should want to go back to the rage and the emptiness and the cold comfort of needing nothing.
He should want that.
He lies on the cold stone. The stitches pull when he breathes. The scent of citrus clings to his fingers. Somewhere above him, far away, the crowd roars for blood and the bells ring and the pits grind on.
He closes his eyes and sees blue. Bright, steady, wide with wonder. He sees a mouth that curves slowly, carefully, testing whether it's allowed. He sees pink spreading from collar to ears, honest and involuntary, and he hears the way the boy said his name.
Zazyrus.
He presses his clawed hand flat against the stone floor and the cold seeps into his palm and does nothing to extinguish the warmth that has settled, stubborn and uninvited, in the center of his chest.
This one is trouble.
Zazyrus sleeps, and the silence holds him, and it is not empty anymore.