4. Brock
Brock
I stay by the stairs, where I can see the whole room.
Old habit. In most rooms I do it so I can read the exits. In this one I do it because this room is where I learned to read at all.
We’ve been coming here since before any of us could shift.
Before the Legion, before the unit, before anyone called Leif anything but his name.
We learned what we were in this house. We got stitched back together on that table more times than I want to count.
We hid from the Vestry here twice, buried a friend from the ridge out back, and celebrated things in this room that the rest of Teth never found out happened.
Every memory I have that matters has all five of us in it, and most of them have these walls around them.
And now she walks in.
Flip-flops in one hand, hair a war she’s lost, three hours of complaints behind her, and she crosses the threshold of the most guarded place five dragons have ever loved like it’s nothing. Like it’s easy.
She stops in the middle of the room and turns in a slow circle.
“Okay,” she says. “This is aggressively cozy. This looks like Pinterest had a baby with a lumberjack.”
I don’t know what a Pinterest is.
Neither does anyone else, going by the room. Rayner looks at Leif to check whether he should laugh. Leif looks as confused as Rayner. Erik huffs at the stove — one strangled breath — because Erik is the only one in this room with any idea what she just said.
Three years on Earth. She has a whole language, and he’s the only one of us who speaks it.
The best part of the joke didn’t need translating, though. It was that face of hers while she made it. So expressive, and I can’t read a word of it correctly most of the time.
We’re all here thinking about the fifteen minutes of Elara talking without a filter in our heads. Words that we’re not supposed to have. While she’s standing in the middle of our childhood, and she has no idea.
About any of it.
She doesn’t know what here is or what it means, and all I can think about is the fact that she belongs here.
Nobody in this room is handling that well. They’re all trying to act normal and failing miserably. I want to laugh because she doesn’t even know what normal looks like.
When she drifts over near Erik, he hands her a mug of something hot before she can ask.
I count the mugs on the shelf behind him.
Six.
There have been five mugs on that shelf for longer than the country she lives in has existed. I look at the sixth one, and then at the man who got here first, and I do the only math there is. He lit the fire, started dinner, and made the cabin hers before any of us walked in the door.
Of course he did.
I don’t say anything. Neither does he. She wraps both hands around the mug like it’s the first good thing that’s happened all day and says thank you to the room in general. Erik tips his head an inch and goes back to the stove.
She looks up, catches me watching, and smiles like we’re in on something together.
I have no idea what she thinks we’re in on.
I smile back anyway. I don’t think I can help myself anymore.
That’s when I notice Gunnar isn’t in the room.
No announcement. No door. Just a Gunnar-shaped absence where the loudest person in any room should be, and nobody else has registered it yet because they’re all pointed at her. I should have noticed it sooner.
I heard what he heard on that walk. We all did.
But I also watched it go through him — “he hasn’t looked at me once, I am not okay with caring about that” — and I watched his hands, and I know the difference between Gunnar annoyed and Gunnar drowning, because I’ve been reading that particular book since we were kids, and I wrote half the margins.
I turn toward the stairs.
“Food’s ready,” Erik says behind me, in the tone of a man who did not get here first to let dinner go cold.
“Be right there. Give us a few.”
He looks at me. Then past me, up the stairs, at the absence. He doesn’t ask. “I’ll keep it warm.”
I make my way upstairs and find Gunnar in the far bedroom.
The one with the window that faces the ridge, which every one of us has stood at when we needed to not be looked at.
He’s got both hands braced on the dresser and he’s staring out at the dark like it owes him an answer, and his shoulders are up around his ears.
“You alright?”
“Fine.”
I lean against the doorframe and wait.
“Gunnar.”
“What?” He turns around, and it’s not anger on his face.
I’d know what to do with anger. “What do you want me to say, Brock? What? That some little woman from Earth — who is apparently a dragon, by the way, a female dragon, which is a fairy tale, which is a thing our mothers made up so we’d go to sleep — has me so twisted in knots I can’t think straight?
That I spent fifteen minutes straight listening to everything in her head with no filter because none of us could figure out how to tell her to stop? ”
“Gunnar—”
“She thinks about me.” His voice drops on it.
All the speed goes out of him at once. “Whether she wants to or not. You heard it. She thinks about me, just like I think about her. Just like she is always in my fucking head, and I can’t get her out, and I don’t think I’m ever getting her out, and I don’t—”
He stops. His jaw works.
“I don’t know that I want to,” he says, and it comes out like a man confessing to the crime he’s been arguing he didn’t commit.
“And my dragon.” He laughs, and there’s nothing in it.
“He’s done. He’s done pretending. He wants her.
He wants to claim her, Brock, he’s wanted it since the apartment, and on Earth I could keep him quiet and here he will not shut up.
Centuries I’ve told everyone fate doesn’t get a vote.
Nobody told me fate was going to smell like—”
He doesn’t finish it. He’s breathing like the walk is still happening.
I cross the room.
I take his face in both hands, the way I have after battles and burials and the nightmares he pretends he doesn’t have, and I make him look at me until I’m sure he’s actually behind his own eyes. He is. Barely. Pacing the fence line of himself.
I kiss him.
Not soft. Soft makes Gunnar suspicious. I kiss him the way he needs when he’s like this — firm, certain, thumbs along his jaw — and the first press of his mouth is heat and salt and three hours of night air, familiar as a language I’ve spoken since before I knew it was one.
He makes a rough sound against my lips, half protest, and I feel it more than hear it, a vibration that lands low in my chest and stays there.
I know that sound too. It means keep going.
His stubble scrapes my chin. His hands leave the dresser and fist in my shirt, knuckles pressing hard into my sternum, dragging me in, and the metal of his tongue ring slides cool along my lower lip before it clicks against my teeth — deliberate, it’s always deliberate, four centuries and he still plays that card like I haven’t memorized the deck.
Heat goes through me anyway.
That’s the part I don’t say.
And for a stretch the kiss stops being regulation and becomes just want.
His and mine. Older than the unit. Older than almost everything except this house.
He kisses like he argues, fast and certain and looking for the edge of it.
He crowds into me, all that restless height finally pointed somewhere, chest to chest so I can feel his heart going — too fast, still too fast — and I let him have it, let him press me back a half step and take what he needs, because taking is how he asks. My own pulse is up. He knows it too.
Then I gentle it down. Slow the pace, soften my mouth, ease my grip from holding him still to just holding him — and he follows, he always follows, that’s the part he’d deny with his dying breath — until we’re just breathing against each other’s mouths, his exhale warm and ragged on my lips.
This is the part I’m actually here for. The after.
His breath punches out through his nose.
His forehead comes down against mine, skin warmer than normal the way it always runs when his dragon’s been up, and the shaking in his hands goes still where they’re pressed flat against my chest. Under my fingers, along his jaw, his pulse comes down.
Slower.
Slower.
There.
I hold his face and feel everything settle.
I kissed him to calm him down.
Mostly.
“Better?”
“…Yeah.” He lets out a long exhale and the whole ridge of his shoulders comes down. “Thank you. I needed that.”
“I know.”
We stand there a moment longer, breathing the same air, and I don’t say any of the things I could say.
Not about her. Not about us. Not about the way this always goes, him running loud and me standing still.
He knows I know. That’s the arrangement.
It has been for a very long time, and tonight is not the night to renegotiate it — tonight already has enough impossible things in it.
“You going to make it through dinner?” I ask.
He thinks about it. Honestly, which is rare.
“…Probably not.”
“Fair.” I let go of his face. “Let’s go see what happens.”
He huffs — almost a laugh, the first one in hours — and follows me down.
She looks up when we hit the bottom of the stairs. Both of us, together. Something crosses her face, quick and warm, and this one she says in a language I know.
She’s happy for us.
She’s caught something, she doesn’t know what, and she’s glad — glad like she would be for two men that have nothing to do with her. Somebody else’s story, their happily ever after.
She has no idea she’s the reason. She has no idea she’s ours — his, mine, all of it — and she turns back to her plate and says something to Rayner about load-bearing fireplaces, and the room laughs. Beside me Gunnar makes a sound like a man who has just been shot somewhere non-fatal.
Probably not, he said.
Definitely not is more like it.