32. Saren
SAREN
There is a rite my people have not performed in three generations, because you do not bond yourself to a future when you have decided you have none.
I find the words for it in the archive, the full form, older than the Hollow Wake, older than the fall.
There are two halves to it, the records say — the private binding, where two people swear themselves to each other and no one else, and the clan-claiming, the public rite where a mate is named before the whole people and woven into them.
The clan-claiming needs peace, and witnesses, and time we may not live to spend.
The private binding needs only the two of us and the dark.
So with Daxira's fleet still hours out and the crew braced for a fight that may end us, I do the foolish, necessary thing: I ask Althea to bind herself to me tonight — privately, the first half of the old rite, the half that asks nothing of the future except that we face it tied together — before the dark gets another chance to take what I love.
"It's not a wedding," I tell her, in the hush of our quarters, suddenly unsure of every word.
"It's older than that, and smaller tonight — just us, no clan, no witnesses, the half of the rite that belongs to no one but the two people swearing it.
The Ishani believed a true mate is ballast, a thing you steady against when the universe tries to throw you off it.
This is the promise to be that. For each other.
If we live through what's coming, I will claim you in the full rite, before the whole clan, in the light, with every soul aboard as witness — but that half is theirs, and this half is only ours, and I wanted us first. All my life I have refused to need anyone, because needing is how they get you.
I am done refusing. I would like to need you out loud, in my own tongue, where the dead can hear it. "
Her eyes are wet, which she would deny under torture. "Say the words," she says. "Teach me my part."
So I do. We mark each other — a line drawn in old pigment along the collarbone, the place a Reaper's pulse runs closest to the surface, the place the bond first sang when I touched her on a bridge a lifetime ago.
I say the vow in the tongue of a dead world and she says it back, clumsy and certain, and the bond opens between us all the way, no door left to hold against it, and I feel her settle into the center of me like ballast into a hold, and the lifelong list of my dead goes quiet for once, outshouted by something living.
And then the rite becomes the other thing, the way it was always meant to, and I take my time with her like a man who finally believes he has time to take.
I undress her slowly, learning her again as though I'd never once been allowed to before.
The salvaged ceremonial cloth comes away from one shoulder, then the other; I draw it down the length of her and let it pool forgotten on the deck, and then there is only the marked skin and the low light and my hands taking the rest of it from her piece by piece, unhurried, until she is bare beneath me and the pigment vow gleams dark along her collarbone.
She helps me out of mine with far less patience — she is always impatient — dragging the harness and everything beneath it away until there is nothing left between us but heat
"You taste so fucking good," I growl against her throat, my voice rough with desire. "I want to taste every part of you."
"Then do it," she gasps. "Stop talking about it."
I smirk against her skin. I take my time worshiping her, learning every sound she makes, the way she arches into my touch, the way her breath catches when I find a sensitive spot.
I work my way down her body, pressing open-mouthed kisses to her collarbone, her breasts, the valley of her stomach.
When I reach the apex of her thighs, I look up at her through my lashes.
"Tell me what you want," I say. "I want to hear you say it."
"I want you to eat my pussy," she says, flushed and shameless. "I want your tongue on me, I want you to make me come—"
I obey. I put my mouth on her and she gasps, her hands fisting in my hair. I lap at her, broad strokes that make her hips buck, then focus on her clit with tight circles that have her crying out within minutes. I slide two fingers into her, feeling her clench, and I don’t let up.
"Fuck, Saren—" She's already close. "Don't stop, don't stop, I'm going to—"
I feel her shatter against my mouth and I drink it down, every last tremor, until she's boneless and gasping.
Then I rise over her, and she guides me to her entrance. "I need you inside me," she says, urgent. "Please, Saren, I need to feel you—"
I sink into her, slow and deep, and we both groan.
I still for a moment, letting her adjust, and then I move.
It is slow, and it is whole, and we move together in the marked dark with the vow still warm on both our mouths.
The bond runs bright and even between us, no longer a chord struck and silenced but a note held, sustained, two instruments finally tuned to each other.
When the slow ache of holding still becomes too much for either of us, I gather her up without leaving her — one arm beneath her, lifting — until she is seated astride my lap, her knees against my hips and her marked chest flush to mine, as close as two people can be folded together.
She winds her arms around my neck and we move like that for a while, face to face, her forehead against mine, the bond a steady current and her breath breaking warm against my mouth on every roll of her hips.
I have never once in my life been held while I held someone.
I did not know it was a thing a body could starve for until hers gave it to me.
Then, when she begins to shake with how close it is, I lay her back down into the bedding the way the rite's own tenderness asks — slow, reverent — and brace over her, and her hand finds mine.
"Look at me," I command softly. "I want to see your eyes when you come."
Her eyes meet mine, and I take her hand, pressing it above her head.
I watch her face as I move inside her, the way her pupils dilate, the way her lips part on a moan.
The bond is a steady current between us, and I can feel everything she's feeling — the pleasure building, the love, the trust. She's so open, so vulnerable, and she's giving it all to me.
"Harder," she begs. "Saren, please, harder—"
I drive into her, deep and relentless, and she wraps her legs around my waist. I watch her come apart beneath me, her hands fisted in the bedding and my name breaking out of her.
Her body arches and shudders, clenching around me, and that sends me over the edge too.
I follow her with the old words still on my lips, spilling everything I am into the woman who taught a dying man the difference between surviving and being alive.
After, marked and spent and tangled, she lies with her head over my heart and traces the drying pigment on her own collarbone like she can't quite believe it's real.
"My whole life I was the thing people picked up and set down when they were done," she says, very quietly, into my chest. "You're the first one who ever picked me up like I was worth keeping.
Not because I was useful. Just because I was me.
" Her voice catches. "I didn't know I was allowed to want that.
I'm keeping it. I'm keeping you. Try and stop me. "
"I have no intention of stopping you," I tell her, and I mean it down to the marrow.
"When this is over, we build something. Not a ship that survives.
A home that lives. Daughters, if the galaxy is ever kind enough.
A wall full of living names beside the dead ones.
" I press my mouth to the mark on her collarbone, sealing the vow one last time.
"I want all of it. With you. After three hundred years of my people wanting only to end well, I want, instead, to begin. "
She smiles against my skin, and it's the realest thing in the universe, and I let myself have it completely.
The alarm shatters it.
Ship-wide, climbing, the tone that means contact — and on the bridge board, sliding out of the dark with all the patience finally gone out of her, comes Daxira's fleet, early, hungry, between us and the only future either of us has ever let ourselves want.
I rise, and reach for my armor, and Althea reaches for hers, and we dress in silence with the marks still fresh on our skin, two people who finally have something to lose walking out together to refuse to lose it.