Chapter 16 #4
My release moved through me like something released under pressure, and I heard myself say her name in a voice I barely recognized, and then it was over and we were both still, both catching our breath, the cave very quiet around us.
I lowered myself carefully to the side, keeping one arm across her, and she turned toward me and pressed her face against my chest. Her breathing was gradually slowing. Mine was doing the same.
For a while neither of us said anything.
Then something strange happened. A faint, unfamiliar sensation moved through my chest, a flutter like a second pulse overlaying my own, there and gone and then there again. I pressed my hand to my sternum, and Niki lifted her head.
"Did you feel that?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, unwilling to put more words to what was clearly magic.
I looked at the cave entrance, where the light had shifted from amber to deep blue.
Avalon was settling into true night outside, the usual chorus of nocturnal sounds fading toward silence.
Niki's hand was warm against my ribs, her breathing evening toward sleep, and I lay there taking stock of what I actually felt rather than what I thought I was supposed to feel.
There was warmth here, and the specific satisfaction of having been present and careful and genuinely connected to another person.
There was something that I thought might be the early shape of love, though I held that word carefully because I wasn't sure yet whether I was remembering how love was supposed to feel and mapping her onto it, or whether what I felt was really her specifically.
I wanted to be honest about that difference, at least with myself.
What I was certain of was simpler. I knew her.
Not all of her, not yet, but enough to want to know the rest. I knew how she moved through the world and how she sounded when she was angry and what she looked like when she was trying not to be afraid.
I'd watched her throw herself between me and her own people's mercy without a second of hesitation, and I hadn't forgotten that and didn't intend to.
I wanted to stay with her while I kept healing.
I wanted to be someone she could trust with her weight.
Whether that was a Vaktaire bond in the old sense, I genuinely didn't know.
My memory of those traditions was still coming back in pieces, doors opening slowly onto rooms I hadn't been able to access for a very long time, and I wasn't willing to use a word I didn't fully remember the meaning of just because it might seem meaningful to say it.
"Enslak." Her voice was sleepy, soft.
"I'm here."
"What are you thinking about?"
I considered how to answer that honestly.
"That I want to stay with you," I said. "Not because of whatever that sensation was.
Not because I owe you something for saving my life, though I do.
" I looked down at her. "Because I choose to.
Because you're the person I want to be around while I figure out who I am now. "
She propped herself up slightly to look at me, and even in the low light I could see her taking that in, holding it up against something internal.
"That's a good reason," she said.
"It's also all I'm sure of right now," I said. "I want to be honest about that. There's still a great deal I'm remembering. I don't know what I'm going to find when the rest of the rooms open."
She nodded, slow and serious. "I know. That's okay." She settled back against my chest. "I'm not going anywhere while you find out."
I pressed my lips to the top of her head and kept them there for a moment.
Outside, Avalon was fully dark and fully quiet.
Inside, the embers of the fire had settled to a deep orange glow.
I pulled the thermal blanket up around us and felt her exhale fully for the first time since the Ulkommenian ships had appeared.
"Sleep," I said quietly.
She was already almost there. Her breathing had gone deep and even by the time I finished the word, her body completely relaxed against mine with the trust of someone who'd decided to stop holding themselves up.
I lay awake a little longer, as I usually did, watching the shadows and listening to the sounds that belonged to this place and the ones that didn't. Everything that reached me was safe. The forest, the river, the low pulse of the planet settling into its own night.
I didn't know what came next. I didn't know how much more of myself would come back, or what shape the future looked like for two people who'd found each other at the end of something terrible and decided to stay.
I couldn't promise her permanence when I was still learning what my own mind contained.
But she was here. I had chosen this. And for the first time in a very long time, the not-knowing didn't feel like falling. It felt like standing on solid ground and deciding to take a step forward, which was a different thing entirely.
I kept one hand warm against the curve of her back, let my eyes close, and eventually I slept too.