Sarn
The lock takes me the way it always takes me, from the inside, no warning, the breeding-drive and the holding-drive folding into a single thing, and that thing closes my coils on what I am breeding.
This is the moment I have watched come for weeks and there is nothing I can do inside it.
I am not driving. I knew I wouldn’t be. The rut has the wheel and the rut does not know her ribs from a beam, does not know holding her from ending her, and I cannot feel the edge, I have never been able to feel the edge, and she is in my coils and I am closing.
Far off, under the white roar of it, her body starts to labor for air.
The pits hand it to me as warmth and I cannot make my coils answer.
I am sealed inside my own rut watching the one thing in the world I would die before harming run out of breath, and my body will not unclench, and I cannot reach the part of myself that decides.
Then her hand moves. She is gone, I can read that much, her mind washed out past speaking, past thinking, nothing left in her that could form a plan.
And her hand moves anyway. One arm free to the elbow, pinned everywhere else, and it drags up the length of my throat to my jaw and presses her wrist flat to the pits, and I know she did not decide it, because there is no one home in her to decide.
Her body did it without her. It has read me so many times it no longer waits to be told.
And the pits find her.
Her pulse gone thin and fast, the air not reaching the bottom of her, the single thing I need and could not feel handed to me through the one sense I cannot shut. Too far. You’ve gone too far.
I find the edge. Not by feeling it in myself. By feeling it in her. And I open the coils.
The air goes into her in a rush I feel through every loop, and she sobs with it, and I would give the whole garrison to take the last minute back. I have her. I did not end her. The distance between those two was her hand on my jaw and nothing else.
The lock keeps the rest of us. That much I can’t open, and would not if I could, my body sealing what it has spent into her with a finality I feel settle through us both.
This is the part that does not come undone.
Under the fear and the relief, the thing my body has climbed toward since the day they set her on my dock closes and sets, low and certain and permanent.
Mine. Not the word this time. The fact. The claim is made, and I made it, my body did, in a lock she had to save her own life to live through, and that is the truth of what I am that I carry now.
I claimed her. She has claimed nothing. She gave me her pulse to keep from dying, not to keep me, and I won’t pretend the one was the other.
She lies in my coils with my breeding sealed in her and her hand still open on my jaw, breathing, alive, claimed, and not mine as I would sell the rest of my life to be hers.
The pits read her, warm, spent, frightened, and under it the cycle already turning toward catching.
I can taste it starting in her, the change that has not finished happening yet.
She gave me her pulse to keep from dying.
She did not give me the rest, and I will not take the one for the other.
So I hold her, claimed and not keeping me, and I keep the watch I have always kept, except now it is on the one breathing body in my coils, and I do not let the relief talk me into believing I have earned her.