Chapter 13
Lethe should be terrified.
He has had plenty of time to think about this.
The walk back to his room after the hasty bandaging.
The hours since, spent tending to other creatures, restocking supplies, cleaning instruments, performing every small task available to him with a focus that is clearly, obviously displacement.
He's been thinking about it while his hands worked and his voice narrated and his body moved through the routine, and the thinking has been comprehensive and obsessive and has led him to a conclusion that should alarm him far more than it does.
Zazyrus grabbed him.
Zazyrus grabbed him with both hands, claws on his hips, and pulled him forward and made a sound that was low and raw and unmistakable.
Zazyrus's hands on his body were hard and urgent and his eyes, when Lethe met them, were black and burning and his voice, those two words scraped out of his throat, was the sound of a creature on the edge of control.
Lethe should be terrified.
He turns the memory over in his mind the way he turns everything over, methodically, examining each facet.
The grip. The sound. The words. The heat in those black eyes.
He holds each detail up to the light and compares it against the catalog of violence he carries in his body, the comprehensive archive of what it feels like to be grabbed by someone who wants to hurt you.
He compares and contrasts with clinical precision and arrives, again and again, at the same conclusion.
It wasn't the same.
When Demos grabs him, the grip is proprietary.
Fingers on his wrists, his arms, his throat, hands that hold him in place because his place is determined by someone else and his body is a thing to be positioned.
The grab is followed by more grabbing, by the systematic removal of resistance, by the methodical reduction of Lethe to a body that endures.
When Zazyrus grabbed him, it was reaction.
Instinct. A body responding to a stimulus it didn't expect, and the grab was not followed by more grabbing.
It was followed by words. By a warning. By Zazyrus telling Lethe the boundary, giving him the information, and then his hands opening.
One finger at a time. Releasing Lethe with a deliberateness that cost him visibly, obviously, in the shaking of his arms and the tension in his jaw and the sound of his breathing, which was not the breathing of a creature in control.
He didn't hurt Lethe. He grabbed him and he didn't hurt him and he told him to stop and then he let go.
And Lethe heard the fire in his words. And Lethe saw the heat in his gaze. And Lethe felt, beneath his own shock and the jackhammer of his pulse, the specific, undeniable, devastating awareness of Zazyrus's arousal.
He's not afraid.
He's not afraid at all. Not even a little.
And that's the part that should alarm him, the part that violates every survival rule he's built for himself over six years.
A beast twice his size grabbed him with clawed hands and growled at him from inches away and Lethe's body responded not with the familiar cold flood of dissociation.
With want. With the immediate, visceral recognition of a body that desired his, and his body answering, traitorous and alive, with desire of its own.
He sits on the edge of his cot and presses his hands over his face and breathes into his palms.
Lethe drops his hands. Stares at the wall.
I have to go back in there.
He has to go back. The wounds still need tending. The ribs are freshly wrapped and the forearm stitches need checking and the forehead gash was hastily bandaged and Lethe left his professional standards on the floor of that cage along with his composure and both need retrieving.
He picks up his satchel.
***
Zazyrus holds himself stiff when Lethe enters.
Lethe sees it immediately. The beast is rigid against the wall, every line of his body drawn tight with a tension that is different from his usual controlled stillness.
His usual stillness is a choice, a deliberate allocation of energy.
This is the opposite. This is the stillness of a creature trying very hard not to move, as though movement itself has become dangerous, as though his body has proven itself untrustworthy and he's holding it on a leash.
He doesn't look at Lethe. His eyes fix on a point on the opposite wall and stay there, and his jaw is clenched so hard Lethe can see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
He thinks he's scared me off, Lethe realizes. He thinks the grab was too much. He thinks I won't come back, or I'll come back different, and he's bracing for it.
The realization lands in Lethe's chest with a thud.
He kneels. Opens his satchel. Takes out his supplies and arranges them on the cloth and his movements are deliberately normal, deliberately routine, the same sequence he's performed every visit since the first. He doesn't rush.
He doesn't hesitate. He lets the familiarity of the ritual speak for itself.
"Morning," he says. "I need to redo that bandage on your forehead. I made a mess of it yesterday. Sorry about that."
Zazyrus doesn't respond. The tension doesn't ease. His eyes remain fixed on the wall.
Lethe talks.
He talks the way he always talks, the steady, unhurried stream that fills the cage and asks for nothing.
Soot chased a moth last night and knocked over a bag of flour and Maren threatened to evict her and Lethe negotiated a stay of execution in exchange for mopping the kitchen floor.
The weather above is turning warm, apparently.
A guard mentioned it. Spring coming. Lethe doesn't know what spring looks like aboveground.
He's been down here six years and the seasons are abstract concepts, but he imagines they involve flowers, and he tells Zazyrus about the flowers he'd grow if he had a garden, the list that he keeps adding to.
He works while he talks. Removes the hasty bandage from Zazyrus's forehead. Cleans the wound properly, the way he should have done yesterday before everything went sideways. Applies salve. Stitches, neat and even, the work he's good at. Bandages, clean and snug.
He hums.
He doesn't decide to do it. It happens the way things sometimes happen with Lethe, the automatic behaviors surfacing when his conscious mind is occupied elsewhere.
He hums a melody he learned from Maren, something old and slow and gentle, and the sound fills the space between his words, low and warm, and he doesn't realize he's doing it until he's three bars in and by then it feels wrong to stop.
The tension in Zazyrus's body changes.
Not all at once. In increments, in degrees, the way ice melts.
The clench of his jaw loosens. His shoulders drop, fractionally.
His breathing, which has been shallow and controlled, deepens.
His eyes, which have been fixed on the wall, move.
They move to Lethe's hands, first. Then his face.
Then away again, then back, as though testing whether looking is permitted.
Lethe keeps humming. Keeps working. Checks the forearm stitches, pleased with his work from yesterday despite the circumstances. Checks the rib wrapping. Everything is holding.
"You can look at me," Lethe says. Quiet. Almost amused. "I'm not going to shatter."
Zazyrus's eyes find his. The expression in them is guarded and uncertain and searching, and Lethe holds the gaze and lets himself be seen, the way he always does in this cage, and what Zazyrus finds in his face must be sufficient because something in the beast's body releases.
Not all the tension. Not even most of it.
But the leash he's holding himself on loosens, incrementally, and the rigidity softens into something closer to his usual contained stillness.
A sound. Low. The rumble that Lethe has learned to interpret as acknowledgment. It resonates in the cage, vibrating in Lethe's sternum, and Lethe's chest does the thing, the expanding thing, the warm and terrifying thing.
"Good," Lethe says. "Now hold still. I want to check the wound on your hip."
He reaches for Zazyrus's waistband and the beast's breathing hitches and Lethe pauses, just for a moment, and meets his eyes. "I'll be careful," he says. Calm. Sure. The voice that doesn't break.
Zazyrus holds still. Lethe checks the hip wound. Everything is fine.
Everything is fine.
***
The dynamic shifts.
Not overnight. Over days, over visits, over the accumulated weight of Lethe showing up and talking and humming and being, stubbornly and persistently, unafraid. Zazyrus relaxes when he sees that Lethe is not scared. And then he does something he has never done before.
He responds.
Not in words. Not consistently. But in a language that Lethe learns to read with the same attentiveness he brings to wounds and vital signs.
Sounds: the low rumble of acknowledgment, the rough almost-laugh, a new sound that Lethe catalogues as disapproval, a short exhale through his nose that happens when Lethe mentions the guards or the pit lord.
Gestures: a tilt of the head when he's listening, a shift of his weight when he's uncomfortable, a slow blink that Lethe thinks might be agreement or might be the beast equivalent of a nod.
And the tail.
Lethe has paid attention to the tail since his first visit.
It's long and dark and muscular, tipped with a ridge of hard cartilage, and it moves with an expressiveness that Zazyrus's face doesn't permit.
It lashes when he's agitated. It curls tight against his thigh when he's tense.
It goes still, completely still, when he's angry, which is the signal Lethe watches for most closely.
Now it does new things.